"If Women Ran the World"

The Anchoress:

Earlier this month, during her annual campaign fundraiser called “The Ultimate Women’s Power Lunch,” Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois prefaced her introduction of Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards with the declaration that “humanity is at a crossroads on this small planet and that our survival as a species is dependent on women taking charge, taking the world in our own hands.”

If forensic psychologist and men’s rights activist Helen Smith is correct, Schakowsky and her friends may have their hands full of the world, and sooner than they think. In her upcoming book Men on Strike, Smith offers up statistics and her own research to suggest that men are consciously boycotting marriage, fatherhood, and the “American Dream” because they feel beaten down by politically correct preferences and practices—in school, in the workplace, and in society in general. If the women want the world and all the power, the thinking goes, they can have it; the men will simply retire to whatever man-caves they are permitted.

Smith suggests that after several decades of giving particular attention and encouragement to female students, with good results, it may be time for schools and society to pay attention to the males, and to observe what has happened to those boys less-celebrated, who are now men feeling left behind and lonely. In a recent column for the New York Times, Ross Douthat cited troubling statistics: “The suicide rate for Americans 35 to 54 increased nearly 30 percent between 1999 and 2010; for men in their 50s, it rose nearly 50 percent.”